Dean McMorris Speaks on "Consensus Pyramids" at Workshop Honoring Edwin Diday on September 4 in Paris

Dean F.R. "Buck" McMorris of the College of Science and Letters and Professor of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, was one of eight international researchers invited to speak at the Workshop on Data Analysis and Classification, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris, on Sept. 4. The workshop was held in honor of Edwin Diday, founder of the field of symbolic data analysis and Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at the Universite de Paris Dauphine.

Among other things, Diday's work enables analysis and summary of huge databases of information, expanding the potential of data mining and knowledge mining. McMorris's talk, "Consensus Pyramids," focused on methods to aggregate pyramids, which are classification schemes introduced by Diday. They are sometimes used to analyze data with cluster analysis when overlapping clusters are allowed.

McMorris works primarily in the area of applied mathematics, using discrete mathematics to solve problems in biology, data analysis, voting theory and location theory. He has published more than 130 research papers and five books.